What Will You Achieve By Doing An Employee Survey?

Posted by Insightlink on 03/16/15

The Most Important Reasons

If you are considering surveying your employees, the first key step is to ask what you want to achieve by doing so. What are you looking to get out of doing an employee survey? If you aren’t entirely sure, consider our key objectives and see if you can relate to them. If you are already convinced that an employee survey is needed but you are having trouble convincing senior management to agree with you, then you might find this list could help strengthen your case too!

a. Identify Issues:
One of the primary objectives is to give employees the opportunity to provide feedback and to identify the issues that are important to them. Although you may be talking to your employees on a regular basis, they may feel that they are talked down to from senior management. An employee survey is a chance to hear what is important to them.

b. Timely and Accurate Feedback:
Another objective is to be able to give you accurate and timely feedback… timely meaning it’s current. It is up to date and accurate because you invite everybody to participate, so you aren’t just listening to the ‘squeaky wheels’, you are actually giving everybody the opportunity to share their opinions and can make your decisions based on a much wider view of organizational thoughts and opinions.

c. The Whole Picture:
We also thinks it’s important to look at both what you are doing well and ways you are performing in a positive way, as well as the areas of concern. We don’t want you to just focus on the negative, we want you to be able to see both the positives and the negatives.

d. Benchmarking:
It’s also important to compare and benchmark yourself against other organizations to see how your performance is doing alongside others. You are in a competitive environment, competing for resources and competing for talent, so it is important that you be able to use your survey data to be able to compare your company to similar data collected from similar organizations.

e. Action Planning:
More importantly, having survey data gives you a chance to prioritize the action you need to take to improve your organization. This will help you decide what is going to give you the best ‘bang for your buck’ in terms of action planning, new initiatives and changes within the organization that will all to help improve employees’ work experience.

f. The Most Important Reason: Improve Organizational Performance
This is the reason Insightlink is so passionate about employee surveys. We really believe that the most important reason for surveying employees is to help improve your overall organizational performance. There is a lot of evidence that shows that, as employees become more satisfied and engaged, that creates positive outcomes for the organization as a whole, including higher productivity, improved retention, less turnover, and greater customer satisfaction. If your employees are happy with the job they’re doing they are going to communicate that with enthusiasm to their internal customers and to your very important external customers. In fact there is evidence that just by increasing job satisfaction and engagement, Wall Street values companies at a higher level than those that don’t have the same level of engagement… so even better financial performance can result from embarking on an employee survey (Edmans, 2012).

An employee survey is just the first step in the process and it should never be the final step. An employee survey is really only part of the objective to continually improve your work environment, job satisfaction and level of employee engagement. At Insightlink, our goal is to get you the knowledge and insight you need to improve job satisfaction and employee engagement so that your organization can benefit from all the advantages these improvements bring you.

We’d love to show you how we can help in greater detail so please get in touch for a quote, a demo or to talk about employee surveys at www.insightlink.com.

Reference:
Edmans, Alex. (2012) The Link Between Job Satisfaction and Firm Value, With Implications for Corporate Social Responsibility. Retrieved from http://faculty.london.edu/aedmans/RoweAMP.pdf

About

Insightlink Communications are experts in employee survey design, data collection and analysis. Since 2001 we've helped companies of all sizes measure and improve their employee satisfaction and engagement.